How to Fix a Cover System Picking Cover Facing the Enemy

An AI that sprints to cover and then stands fully exposed chose a point without considering which way the cover protects. Scoring cover by its normal relative to the threat fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Score cover by its protection normal

For each cover point, take the dot of its outward normal with the direction from cover to the threat; prefer points where the cover sits between the agent and the enemy.

2. Verify with an occlusion trace

Raycast from the cover position to the threat; only accept the point if geometry blocks the line, so a wrongly-oriented or short cover is rejected.

3. Penalize flankable cover

Down-rank cover the threat can quickly walk around, factoring in the threat's position and likely approach so the AI does not pick a spot that is only briefly safe.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.